AT THE LAUNCH of BBC Two's magnificent, star-studded production of King Lear, director Sir Richard Eyre said that Shakespeare's play was very much about the inexorable bonds of family.

Sir Anthony Hopkins takes the lead role in a stellar small screen production (Image: BBC/ PLAYGROUND ENTERTAINMENT/ ED MILLER)

The tale of an aged monarch dividing his kingdom between three daughters and expecting undivided love from them, all has resonance for Eyre.

"My relationship with my parents wasn't terribly good and I thought that would dissolve and I would have a more benign feeling about it. But it doesn't work like that."

It seems to have a resonance, too, for 80-year-old Sir Anthony Hopkins, who plays Lear. He admitted in a Radio Times interview this week that he hadn't spoken to his only child, Abigail, for 20 years, saying he didn't know where she lived or what her personal circumstances are.

"I don't have any idea," he confessed. "People break up. Families split people make choices. I don't care one way or the other."

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You don't have to like your family. Children don't like their fathers. You don't have to love each other.

Anthony Hopkins

He added: "You don't have to like your family. Children don't like their fathers. You don't have to love each other."

Is it any wonder his performance as Lear is so brilliant? It's made even stronger by his supporting cast of household names: Emma Thompson, Jim Carter, Jim Broadbent, Emily Watson, Andrew Scott and Christopher Eccleston, plus a strong supporting cast of actors.

Thompson describes the line up as "luxury casting" and of a calibre that would be highly unlikely to ever be gathered together for a stage production.

King Lear for the small screen came about after Eyre and Hopkins had worked together on a TV production of The Dresser, with Hopkins as an ageing actor playing King Lear on stage.

"It meant we were talking a lot about the play," says Eyre. "I had directed it and Tony had been in it and we rather facetiously talked about how we would make a film of it.

"Then the executive producer, Colin Callender, said, 'You have to do this', as did my wife (Sue Birtwistle), who is a very successful television producer.

"So Tony and I spent two years exchanging emails about more or less everything about King Lear, and by the time we came to start rehearsals we both knew what we thought of him and the world he inhabits."

According to Eyre, 75, King Lear is "the best play ever written" and he says Hopkins attacked the role of Lear in this production with vigour: "I think he's the most extraordinary, eccentric, loveable and bizarre actor.

"He generates a kind of nuclear energy on set and is terribly watchable. If he was to see anyone patronising someone on set, whatever role they were playing, Tony would be after them.

"There's something magnificent about a man who is 80, who has been acting for 60 years, having that propriety and mutual courtesy and generosity on set."

Emma Thompson, who plays Lear's eldest daughter Goneril, had already appeared with Hopkins in The Remains Of The Day and Howard's End and was happy to perform a Hopkins hat-trick.

"It's our third time working together and we were quite young before so, with me at nearly 60 and him at nearly 80, when we were filming it was great as we were free in a way we weren't before.

Jim Broadbent in King Lear as the Earl of Gloucester (Image: BBC/ PLAYGROUND ENTERTAINMENT/ ED MILLER)

"We acknowledged the fact that now we can do anything and it didn't matter if we failed or looked stupid. We could be fearless and that's a very creative place to be."

Jim Carter plays Lear's faithful servant, the Earl of Kent, and has had a Hopkins experience, too: "I worked with him on Transformers 5," he says, drily. Jim was the voice of Cogman, Anthony was Sir Edmund Burton.

Carter, Downton Abbey's Carson, believes accessible television productions of Shakespeare (this one is in modern dress with a very contemporary feel) are vital.

"Bringing it to people at home, rather than people having to make the effort to go out and see it, is hugely important," he says.

"Like a lot of kids I was intimidated by Shakespeare but I went on a school trip in the 1950s probably, to see Laurence Olivier in the film of Richard III, and it was absolutely inspirational. I didn't know you could do it with real horses!"

Sherlock's Andrew Scott plays Edgar, the son of Lear's Prime Minister Gloucester, who has his own family problems as his illegitimate brother Edmund is trying to usurp him. Families, eh?

Scott, too, is a big fan of popularising Shakespeare and thinks that this production will appeal to people who might not normally watch a production.

He says: "I hate the idea that this kind of drama is only for a select few. This play was written 400 years ago and human psychology hasn't changed. King Lear is about the vulnerability of our leaders; the play shows us that they are human and, whether they are young or old, they can go astray.

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In 1978 the BBC set itself the momentous task of adapting all 37 Shakespeare plays with British actors such as Helen Mirren, Alan Rickman & Ian McKellen made some of their finest performances. The BBC Television Shakespeare is part of the Shakespeare at the BBC Collection available on BBC Store.

"What Anthony Hopkins brings to the production is how ferocious and alive he is about being an actor. You'd come on set every day and ask how he'd slept and he'd roar: '**** sleep! I didn't sleep!'.

"We associate that ferocity and passion about life with younger people. But what I found so moving about this production is that it shows that we're alive until we're dead and that our passion can exist until the very end.

"Tony and Richard are at the top of their game."

Hopkins was particularly convincing in the scene where Lear is wandering around, utterly mad and looking completely dishevelled.

"We were filming in Stevenage Town Centre," recalls Eyre, "and a lady in a mobility scooter came up to Tony and said, 'You know there's a hostel up the road, you might want to take your shopping trolley up there'."